Can Google+ Top 400 Million Users by the End of 2012?

If you fancy yourself a betting man, head over to Las Vegas and see if you can find anyone willing to wager which will happen first: the world will end, or Google+ will top 400 million members. Both are predicted to happen in the 2012, the former by the Mayans, and the latter by Paul Allen (stat guy, not the co-founder of Microsoft). Is either one likely to happen?

Here's what we know about the end of the world. People have been predicting man's demise probably since time began, and certainly in the past several decades. Harold Camping got it wrong multiple times, but his fuzzy math wasn't based off of Mayan calculations, which pegs the apocalypse for December 21, 2012 (not without dispute, of course).

Moving on, Google+ just passed the 62-million users mark, according to a post by Paul Allen, who lists himself as an "unofficial statistician" on his profile. By Allen's math, Google+ is adding 625,000 new users per day, and he predicts 400 million Google+ users by the end of 2012.

"Google+ is adding new users at a very rapid pace. It may be the holidays, the TV commercials, the Android 4 signups, celebrity and brand appeal, or positive word of mouth, or a combination of all these factors, but there is no question that the number of new users signing up for Google+ each day has accelerated markedly in the past several weeks," Allen said in a blog post.

Allen isn't pulling these numbers of thin air. According to Allen, his team from Elance runs hundreds of queries on various surnames they've been tracking since July, and in conjunction with Google's periodic user announcements, it gives him and and his team a rough estimate on Google+'s userbase.